Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  The flight itself lasted nearly eighteen minutes, with Zeppelin and the crew trying to learn on the job how to keep an airship stable. Finally, Zeppelin decided to settle on the water some distance away to let the towboats bring it back to the hangar. He hoisted a large blue flag to warn the sightseeing boats to steer clear. “The air ship sank slowly and rested on the water as smoothly as a sea-gull, with no bump, no crash, no rise, no jumping, no sensation whatever,” recalled Wolf.13

  It had been a moderate, qualified success. On the one hand, LZ-1 hadn’t crashed or blown up, Dürr’s design was evidently sound, and it had ascended to 1,300 feet and traveled in total some 3.5 miles. On the other, the airship had not made a round trip back to the hangar under its own power despite favorable winds, its top speed was unspectacular, and flight control had been lackluster.

  Zeppelin had enough money left over to fund two more trial flights. He and Dürr got to work fixing and improving LZ-1. Among other things, it was clear that the airship’s rudders were too small to be effective and were placed in the wrong position. Dürr made them bigger and moved the rear pair from the sides to beneath the hull. Henceforth, steering would be a little easier.14

  The second flight took place on October 17 at 4:45 P.M. To assist him in managing the ballast and gas during ascents and descents, Zeppelin hired Captain von Krogh, a skilled balloonist. Partly thanks to Krogh’s expert hand, this time LZ-1 rose smoothly to a height of nine hundred feet and stayed airborne for eighty minutes. The flight would have gone on longer had twenty-five thousand cubic feet of hydrogen not escaped from one of the gas cells, a rudder not become stuck, and a harried mechanic not accidentally poured distilled water into the confused engines.15

  Dürr made some more refinements, and on LZ-1’s third trial a week later, it was kept fully under control by the increasingly experienced crew and demonstrated an admirable maneuverability against the wind. By now, though, the airship’s airframe was dangerously weak and hydrogen was running low, so Zeppelin unsentimentally decided to break it apart and begin work on the craft that was to become LZ-2.

  Building LZ-2 would have to be postponed longer than Zeppelin expected. A few weeks later, his company, the Society for the Promotion of Aviation, went out of business. A banking crisis loomed—Berlin’s stock market was about to suffer a 61 percent collapse—and no one was willing to extend a loan to a firm with no cash reserves. There wasn’t even enough money left to replenish the gas, but Zeppelin managed to rustle up just enough from his own rapidly dwindling bank account to buy up the remaining assets and keep Dürr and two night watchmen on the payroll.16 He was on his own. No one seemed to care that he’d flown, actually flown.

  * * *

  —

  PRESS REACTION TO LZ-1’s first flight had indeed been disappointingly sparse, partly because Kaiser Wilhelm II had that very day monopolized the front pages by delivering a fiery, impromptu speech to an expeditionary force sailing for China, where the Boxer Rebellion raged.17

  While some local newspapers cheered the hero who had defied gravity, national and regional ones either ignored his achievement or were cutting about it. The Frankfurter Zeitung, for instance, had sent a reporter, who observed that the “entire countryside was ceremoniously invited to attend a performance to which not even the overture could be played successfully.” In short, the only thing LZ-1 had proven was that “a dirigible balloon is of practically no value.”18 Scientific American, one of the few foreign outlets to comment on the flight, was more charitable only in concluding that the airship might have some use “for exploring expeditions that are not of too extended a character.”19

  The subsequent report by the military observers was guarded. The airship was “neither suitable for military nor for non-military purposes,” which sounded like a typical contribution from Captain Gross, but the observers added that this had been a first flight. LZ-1, they felt, was “an experimental vehicle” and left it at that.20 It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

  The two follow-up flights, however, barely rated a mention. Hugo Eckener, an occasional correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, was surprised when the editor asked him whether he’d be willing to cover the second trial. As a freelance writer on economics, philosophy, and society, as well as occasional arts critic, Eckener had no special interest in either aeronautics or airships and hadn’t paid much, if any, attention to the happenings at Lake Constance. Why him? he asked, only to be told that since he’d recently moved from Hamburg in the north to the warmer climes of Friedrichshafen for his health (rheumatic knees, weak lungs), it wouldn’t cost anything to send him there. Also, well…no one else wanted to go.21

  Eckener, finding himself at loose ends and low on cash, accepted the commission but “adopted a rather cool and critical tone in my story,” as he later admitted. Condescending is probably a better description:

  [The airship] hovered purposefully and nicely in the air, made little twists on its vertical axis, perhaps even small turns. It also executed small turns on its horizontal axis but pretty much stayed happily in the same place. There was no evidence of real movement back and forth or of ascents and descents to higher or lower altitude. I had the sense that the airship was delighted to balance so nicely up in the air [because the] balancing act was the only successful part of the whole affair.

  Having so casually dismissed LZ-1 as a folly, Eckener didn’t bother going to see the third and last flight. He assumed he’d hear nothing more of this crazy old man, his ridiculous contraption, or his fantasies of flight.22

  But he’d gravely underestimated Count von Zeppelin.

  9. The Surprise

  ZEPPELIN HAD SUCCEEDED in getting as far as he had not merely owing to his drive or his temerity, his pluck or his luck, but because he thought differently from his predecessors and his peers. Like Sir George Cayley before him, he had approached the design of his airship modularly: From the beginning, he had envisaged LZ-1 as a unified system composed of modules (the engines, the envelope, the infrastructure, and so forth), each of which required a specific solution. Piece by piece, as the problems were resolved, they were slotted into the greater whole to form a high-level system.

  Not everything was perfect, of course; far from it. LZ-1, as we’ve already seen from its flight tests, suffered a host of bugs and issues. But the concept was sound. Whereas others had sought to bring the One Big Thing—getting off the ground and moving—to realization, they had overlooked or ignored the Many Small Things in the expectation that these would magically be figured out at some later date or patched together on the fly, or even that they didn’t matter. What invariably happened was that seemingly minor issues cascaded into major, usually fatal, flaws.

  David Schwarz, for instance, had simply wanted to get his metal airship built and thus hadn’t bothered to work out the technicalities of gas management. As early as 1893, Zeppelin, conversely, was laboriously thinking through the means of regulating the hydrogen supply, controlling its expansion and compression, and minimizing leakage by adding, for example, automatic relief valves at the bottom and manual valves at the top of each flexible, sealed gas cell.

  It was partly owing to his conviction, then, that LZ-1 was fundamentally “right”—despite the flights being greeted by a collective yawn and his company, the SPA, going bust—that Zeppelin never came close to quitting. In this he was fortunate indeed that he could call upon the support of his dear wife, Isabella, “whom I love to the bottom of my heart, [who] admonished me to not drop my courage and my head.”1

  He was given plenty of opportunities to bow out gracefully but refused to accept them. The kaiser, for instance, congratulated the count for his “epochal” achievement and conferred upon him the Order of the Red Eagle, the second-highest order of chivalry in Prussia.2 For a man like Zeppelin, still smarting from the humiliation of 1890’s Kaisermanöver, this was a major step forward in his psychological quest for rehabil
itation, and no one would have thought less of him for now retiring, honor restored.

  Likewise, his old ally Professor Bach and his friends at the Association of German Engineers urged him to quit while he was ahead. He had achieved so much: Zeppelin had flown as no one else ever had. He had come within a whisker of achieving true aerial navigation as no one else ever had. And he had proven every damn fool critic embarrassingly wrong about the practicality of the airship as no one ever had.

  Instead, the contrarian old count became ever more vehement that the airship would, must, rise again. He held almost daily meetings with Dürr and continued his correspondence—sometimes pleading, sometimes blustering—with Berg (about aluminum), Maybach (about engines), and Moedebeck (about everything else).3

  The two primary flaws of LZ-1 emerged from these discussions. First, it had lacked structural strength, and second, flight control had generally been poor.4 Zeppelin immediately set about rectifying them.

  Dürr locked himself away and worked in secret to improve LZ-1’s successor’s airframe. Berg’s people were already developing an enhanced aluminum-zinc-copper alloy that would increase the tensile strength of the material, so that was promising.5 Dürr also realized that LZ-1’s structure had been at once too complicated and too simple.

  It was too complicated in the sense that LZ-1 had been based on the inexperienced Theodor Kober’s original design, whose transverse rings—the ribs—were twenty-four-sided polygons. Each of the twenty-four intersections had been braced with a cable stretching directly to the one opposite, so forming a kind of wheel-and-spoke arrangement. Dürr reduced the number of sides to sixteen, with three cables now fanning out from each intersection at various angles. The new arrangement would help avoid deformation because it spread pressure more evenly around the circumference.6

  And it was too simple in that all of LZ-1’s longitudinal girders had been flat pieces of aluminum held together by two thin metal strips. Easy to manufacture, they were inherently too weak for the critical strengthening and support work they were expected to perform. Dürr impressed Zeppelin by demonstrating that latticing three beams together to form a triangular girder was exponentially better at preventing buckling, twisting, and bending. Admittedly, it used more aluminum and was somewhat heavier, but the price of hydrogen was dropping, and Daimler’s improved engines were lighter and more fuel-efficient than ever, so the marked performance gains would more than offset the extra weight and cost.7

  For flight control, Dürr was helped by Professor Hugo Hergesell, a friend of Zeppelin’s and an eminent meteorologist. Hergesell, dapperly dressed, pencil-mustached, and outfitted in French-style pince-nez glasses, looked like the habitué of a Parisian café, but his expertise in studying the wind was unrivaled.8 Hergesell advised Dürr to throw out the cumbersome and glitchy sliding-weight contraption (used to adjust pitch, or moving the nose up and down) and to redesign the rudders (for turning left and right, or yaw).

  In Dürr’s next model, these were all gone, replaced by two sets of three horizontal elevator planes attached fore and aft that resembled Venetian blinds. These could be manipulated from the control gondola using pulleys and ropes. Ahead of the front set and behind their rear counterparts was a trio of movable rudders, arranged vertically. Theoretically, if the pilot turned the horizontal elevators diagonally up or down, the wind flowing through the rudders would adjust pitch, and if the rudders were oriented left or right (and the elevators were kept in neutral) they would help turn the airship.9

  If LZ-2 were ever built, that is. By early 1903, after a year of development, it wasn’t looking likely. Zeppelin traveled to Berlin to ask some “extremely rich patrons” for money but came away empty-handed. “Now, within a few days, I must [sell] everything that made the resumption of work possible,” he lamented.10

  To save Zeppelin, Berg pledged to again donate the necessary aluminum. The Daimler company also proved willing to lend a pair of its newest 85-horsepower engines, which lowered the weight-to-power ratio from LZ-1’s 58 pounds per horsepower to just 11 and allowed Dürr to install propellers double the diameter of LZ-1’s.11

  What Zeppelin was short of, then, was ready cash to pay for everything else, such as hydrogen and wages. He composed an appeal for 60,000 marks to cover his latest research costs. The count, being a count, was still rather uncomfortable with the idea of bowing to the masses and so sent the fundraising letters only to men of the “educated classes.” Some ten thousand letters of appeal reaped a mere 8,000 marks.

  Part of the failure was owed to Zeppelin’s tone. His appeal had been an eye-glazingly dull catalogue of technical descriptions, and he came across as a haughty old noble expecting his social inferiors to tug their financial forelocks. Even when there was a friendly reporter present, Zeppelin could not bring himself to play along. Asked by one to consent to an interview, the count had, with inimitable aristocratic hauteur, brusquely replied, “I am not a circus rider performing for the public; I am completing a serious task in service of the Vaterland,” and turned his back to him.

  Luckily, his friends came to the rescue. Hergesell helped out by writing an article on the benefits of airship travel, while Moedebeck ghosted a second appeal in Zeppelin’s name to Die Woche, Germany’s bestselling popular weekly, and urged subscribers to his Illustrated Aeronautical Reports to send in any amount they could afford.

  This time, the appeal was considerably more successful: About 375,000 marks arrived.12 Even so, the bills kept rolling in. After SPA’s bankruptcy in 1900, Zeppelin had dismantled LZ-1’s floating hangar and sold it for scrap to pay off creditors. Now he needed a new one. Its replacement would at least be cheaper to maintain, since it began on land and protruded into the water. Extending from there, one-hundred-yard-long pontoon-mounted metal rails would aid to roll the airship deeper into the lake, where a boat would haul it into open water.13

  And this was before construction work began on LZ-2. To stave off financial collapse, Zeppelin mortgaged the inherited estates of his remarkably patient and empathetic wife for 130,000 marks to pay for equipment and materials, but he was still short on funds and his credit was tapped out.

  As he had once been by the Russians, Zeppelin this time was saved by the French, who were beginning to develop a type of small dirigible known as a Lebaudy for army reconnaissance. Though these ships had nowhere near the same scale, power, or ambition of Zeppelin’s machines, their sinister implications seemed clear to the paranoid Wilhelm II. They were intended, or so he believed, as an aerial navy that would bomb his fortresses and ships.14

  The kaiser was frightened into keeping Zeppelin solvent—just in case he too needed an aerial navy in the future. He approved a grant of 50,000 marks and instructed the Ministry of War to rent the count gas cylinders far below cost.15 It was just enough to let Zeppelin go ahead with LZ-2.

  In April 1905, work began on the airship’s construction. In just seven months, it was completed. LZ-2’s maiden voyage was scheduled for November 30.

  LZ-2 was almost identical to its forerunner in terms of size and capacity, but given Dürr’s radical changes in internal structure, the new engines, and improved flight controls, Zeppelin was understandably bullish on its prospects. He promised the press that something special was in the offing.

  It certainly was.

  * * *

  —

  DRAWN BY ZEPPELIN’S promises of a surprise, a few members of the press, mostly reporters from the provincial papers but also Hugo Eckener from the Frankfurter Zeitung, traveled down to the lake for the great unveiling.

  The count’s entourage was present, of course. One of them was Ludwig Marx, captaining the motorboat Württemberg. He was somewhat older than most of the workmen, who played pranks on him. One of their japes involved drunkenly stealing his prized vessel and joyriding it for a midnight run to Switzerland, to indulge in yet more drinks. Though the good old count had thought it amusing, Mar
x punitively insisted that the men have their wages docked.16

  Now Marx was towing the LZ-2 cautiously out of the hangar and down the rails. Alongside him in the Württemberg stood Professor Hergesell, the meteorologist. Zeppelin and Ludwig Dürr were in the front gondola with two mechanics, with two more and the explorer Eugen Wolf and Captain von Krogh in the rear. Krogh had originally been slotted to work the ballast-and-gas controls, but had graciously surrendered them to placate Dürr, who insisted on doing it.

  All was proceeding smoothly—until it wasn’t.

  According to Marx, a sudden puff of wind at the stern lifted the airship over the motorboat and the towrope became entangled in the elevators at the bow. Marx leaped to cut it as the huge bulk of the airship menacingly bore down on him. As he tussled with the rope, the propellers started to turn. LZ-2’s nose hit the water beside the Württemberg just as Zeppelin pushed past the frozen Dürr to pull the aft release valve for the gas to right the ship. The count’s quick thinking saved the airship from major damage, but the front elevator and rudder assembly were crushed. There would be no flight that day.

  Hergesell blamed Marx for the accident, and the two began to swear at each other, prompting Zeppelin to shout down good-naturedly, “Of course, if Hergesell and Marx quarrel, that will make everything all right again,” shaming them both into cooperation.17

  In spite of the setback, Zeppelin was, as usual, indefatigable and announced that the reborn LZ-2 would make its maiden flight a couple of months later, in January 1906. Zeppelin was taking a risk here: No rational person would launch an airship in the middle of winter owing to the likelihood of storms and high winds, but he couldn’t chance delaying the flight until the spring or summer. For one thing, he couldn’t afford to: The wave of social unrest that had erupted across Russia in early 1905 had destroyed his wife’s inherited estates—the ones so recently mortgaged to finance LZ-2—in what would become Estonia and Latvia.18